


Frozen

by MillyVeil



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Abduction, Angst, Blood and Injury, Clint Barton Needs a Hug, Clint Barton Whump, Delta is still a team, Hurt Clint Barton, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, Natasha Romanov Needs a Hug, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Not Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Compliant, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Revenge, SHIELD is still around, Temporary induced paralysis, Violence, Whump, hearing loss
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2019-02-17
Packaged: 2019-09-30 22:00:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17231972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MillyVeil/pseuds/MillyVeil
Summary: Natasha's past catches up with Clint, and he ends up paying a very high price for her info dump in CA:WS.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ranni](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ranni/gifts).



> Dear Ranni, 
> 
> Remember that fine day back in mid-November when I asked you for a prompt and solemnly swore to finish a 400 word Clint & Nat vignette that same day? You came through and provided me with a wonderful and classic horror/whump prompt: Operating table. I, on the other hand, failed massively, because now we're heading into the new year and I'm ~~8,000~~ 17,900 words deep... and barely halfway. *hides face* 
> 
> Dear everyone else, 
> 
> Please note that this is fic contains BRUTAL depictions of a bad person inflicting physical injuries on a helpless Clint. If you are squeamish about blood this is probably not the story for you. Be kind to yourself. (Also, the title will change once I think of something better.)

Clint doesn’t see it coming.

Oh, he sees the three guys just fine, sees them watch him furtively as he passes on the other side of the street, head down against the rain and hands deep in his pockets. He keeps his attention on them until he turns right two streets over. Hopefully it’s nothing. He’s about halfway down the poorly lit side street when he hears them come up behind him. Dammit. Broken glass crunch under a shoe. A wet sound as someone steps in a puddle. They obviously know shit about moving silently.

“Hey!” one of the guys shouts from behind and Clint stops.

He sighs and squints at the rain that has started to fall harder. He was up at four this morning and that was a long fucking time ago, he’s tired and cold and he’s just not in the mood for whatever bullshit these guys are up to. He just wants to go home and go to bed. Is that really too much to ask? He turns and watches the three of them saunter up. They’ve pulled bandanas up over their mouths and noses, hiding. Idiots. Like he hadn’t committed their faces to memory the moment they pinged his radar.  

He keeps his hands relaxed by his sides. “What’s up, fellas?” he asks lightly, then winces at himself. Wow, he’s been spending too much time with Rogers. He’s starting to sound like him.

They don’t answer, just keep approaching; one straight on, two fanning out to each side. He sees the metal glint of a knife in the hand of the middle guy. He points it at Clint, makes a small stabby motion, and Clint sighs again. Fucking amateur hour.   

He holds up a hand. “Whatever you’ve got planned, guys, let me state up front that this will not end well for you.”

“That right?”

“Yeah.”

“Phone, wallet, watch,” the middle guy demands. He makes a greedy ‘gimme’ gesture.

The phone is cheap and crappy, and there’s nothing in Clint’s wallet that’s of any value to him, just a fake id, a few bucks, and a debit card with a balance of sixty-four dollars. If it were just those things he might be tempted to simply hand them over, to skip the fuss and the fight and the whole mess. But the watch, he flexes his fingers, forget it. They’re not getting his watch.

They fan out further and Clint shifts casually, readying himself for a fight without making it overly obvious. He will have to keep an eye on that knife, but a throat punch will incapacitate the first one, the second one will be on the ground with a broken arm a moment later, and hopefully at that point the third one will grow a brain and take off. Clint really, really hopes he will grow a brain, because he’s seriously not in the mood for this.

“Hand ‘em over,” the guy demands again.

“Not gonna happen.”

They must have been waiting for that, for a reason to pounce, because they charge, all three of them at the same time.

He easily sidesteps the first one, blocks the knife and makes it through steps one and two in his plan, throat punch and snapped radius, and the two guys hit the rain wet ground at his feet. But it’s the third one who throws a spanner in the works, because he doesn’t in fact grow a brain and take off, instead he tackles Clint, a real linebacker tackle that Clint might have been able to field if not asshole number one had chosen that moment to grab at his legs, and Clint goes down.  

It’s a mess of arms and legs and angry shouting, but Clint has training and years of experience they don’t. He slams his knee up, catching number one over the face. Something breaks, and it isn’t Clint’s knee. One drops the knife, rolls away with his hands over his face, groaning. Bright red blood runs between his fingers. Number two is busy screaming about his broken arm, so Clint wraps his legs around number three, locks him in a scissor grip, and he is just about to roll them both when the guy slams something against his neck and he hears a sharp click-hiss. For a brief, horrible moment Clint is sure that it’s the knife, that he’s been stabbed, and he has a moment to think: what a fucking useless way to die.

But then the moment passes and he realizes he’s not stabbed, because the knife still lies where the guy dropped it. He wrenches away, grabs at the hand that’s still pressing against his neck and twists until something gives. Number three shrieks and something clatters to the ground. Clint shoves him away and rolls to his knees, his palm pressed hard to the side of his neck. A pricking coldness is spreading like icy water from the point of contact. Shit. Shit, this is bad. He gets to his feet and backs away unsteadily. There’s no way a group of wannabe gangbangers would be using a jet injector to subdue him instead of just cutting him up or putting a bullet in him. This must be something else, something masquerading as a robbery.

He takes another couple of steps back, aiming to get some distance between himself and his attackers, but he stumbles and has to grab the side of the dumpster to stay on his feet. The prickling cold is deepening, spreading down his arms and chest, and he fumbles for the phone in his pocket. His fingers feel fat and clumsy. He stumbles again, but manages to get his phone out.

He tries to keep one eye on the three men while he attempts to unlock his phone, but his fingers won’t move like he tells them to, he can’t swipe the fucking screen properly. He tries and fails again. What the hell was in that injection? This is bad. He desperately tries to work his phone. Help. He needs help, he needs... A moment later swiping isn’t his biggest issue, because he watches the phone slip from his useless fingers. It clatters to the ground by his feet, landing face up in a shallow puddle. Then his knees buckle and he slides down the side of the rusty dumpster.

Fuck me, he thinks dizzily. This shit works fast.

His blood pounds in his ears as he tries to fight the drugs, but with every second that passes his body shuts down further. His muscles feel leaden. He tries to shape his mouth to speak, but his face feels stiff and wrong, and just a strangled groan comes out. Then gravity becomes too much and he topples forward. He hits the ground with a thud, his right arm caught awkwardly underneath him. The fingers of his free hand twitch feebly towards the phone that lies lit up not more than a foot away, but that’s all he manages, his body has turned to wood, to stone, to something heavy and dead and not his own, and he gets a panicky flashback to another time he was trapped inside his body, unable to do anything but tag along for the horrible ride.

The asphalt is wet and rough under his cheek as he lies there in the rain. He blinks slowly at the guy with the broken nose get to his feet. The guy swipes the back of his hand under his nose, smearing the blood across his cheek as he stumbles towards Clint.

“Motherfucker,” he hisses thickly, and Clint tries to roll away from the vicious kick, but his muscles have shut down. Pain lights up his ribs and his body rocks limply from the impact. No muscle control, but there’s apparently nothing wrong with his pain receptors. Thanks a fucking lot, he thinks bitterly as the guy lands another savage kick. You couldn’t have chosen something that knocked me out completely?

The asshole who had stabbed him with the injector hobbles over. He snarls a curse and lifts his foot, but not for a kick and Clint tries to pull his exposed hand away, get it to safety, but shit, he can’t, his body won’t obey him any longer and he can only watch as the boot comes down to _stomp_ on his loosely curled up fingers. Something snaps and Clint screams, his whole head echoes with it, but not a sound leaves his frozen lips. His hand is nothing but a bundle of nerves on fire, supernova hot and bright and horrible, and he wants to curl up around it and protect himself, but he can’t move. He. Can’t. Move.

Then hands grab the back of Clint’s jacket and he is dragged deeper down the alley. He hangs limply in their grip, his knees dragging along the gravel and wetness and he wonders who he pissed off lately. Is this a SHIELD thing? An Avengers thing? Or a Clint Barton thing?

They drag him through a door into what looks like a derelict apartment building hallway. He can’t lift his head, so all he sees is the dirty floor and the trash and old newspapers that litter it. Their little procession come up on a broken red tricycle lying abandoned in the middle of the hallway, and Clint sees injector guy’s boot kick it to the side. It skids into the wall and topples over.

Without warning they both drop him. He hits the floor face first. Hard. Warm blood bursts from his nose. They wrestle him over onto his back and continue dragging him down the hallway, by his ankles this time. He tastes the coppery tang of blood as it runs down the back of his throat. His head flops uselessly to the side, and he’s left to watch the parade of flimsy, graffiti adorned apartment doors that pass. He can’t make his eyes focus the way he wants to any longer. Fuck. What did they give him? 

The second to last door is open two inches, and as they drag him past it Clint sees a pair of dirty sneakers. The size and model tells him it’s probably a woman. He hopes a bleeding, unconscious-looking guy being dragged on the floor will prompt her to call the cops, but in this neighborhood it’s unlikely. People keep to themselves. Putting your nose where it doesn’t belong tended to lead to it being shot off your face. He hears one of his attackers bark something sharp and short, and the door closes sharply. 

They reach the end of the hallway and he’s taken outside again. A black car is waiting by the curb. It looks shiny and new and very high end, but Clint’s position won’t allow him to take in much detail. Mercedes, he thinks as they haul him up. Maybe. He’s dumped face down in the dark backseat like a sack of potatoes and before the car takes off one of them - he can’t see who - takes his watch. Motherfucker.  

Clint’s face is pressed uncomfortably into the upholstery, and he sees absolutely nothing, just hints of indirect lights in the corner of his eye sweeping across the interior of the car as it makes its smooth way through traffic. His busted hand is trapped under him and his ribs are jostled every time the car turns or stops or hits an uneven patch of road. It hurts like a goddamn bitch and he can’t even shift to take the pressure off.

As they travel, he tries to determine how long it might be before someone realizes he’s gone. Too long, is the conclusion. Natasha is working, location and ETA unknown. Clint himself is on mandated stand-down after last week’s cluster fuck in Bogota and Phil had told him not to show his face at HQ until he was to report back for duty in three days. Maybe Tiger? Clint had agreed to watch tomorrow’s game with him and his new girlfriend over at the sports bar Tiger always hangs out at, and Clint hopes maybe he will wonder if he doesn’t show up. But Tiger knows the name of the game, he’s been with SHIELD for almost as long as Clint has, and more likely is that he will assume Clint got sent out on a job on short notice.

So, chances are pretty good no one will realize he’s missing until it’s too late.

He tries to keep track of the turns, of the number of stops, of the sound the road surface makes, the quality of the road. With the way his face is smushed into the seat, breathing freely isn’t terribly easy, and after a while he feels a forerunner of fear trickle in. He tries to remember what he knows about nerve agents, about neurotoxins, about neuromuscular blockers, but all that seems to have stuck is that if he’s actually been hit with one, he shouldn’t be able to breathe. The lungs need muscles to work, to inflate and deflate, and Jesus, he hopes it’s not something that sets in late, because he really doesn’t want to suffocate to death in the back of this car. He can’t turn his head, can’t even open his mouth wider or take a deeper breath, and his lungs are starting to indicate that they would like just a little more oxygen, please. He does his best to convince himself that he’s not going to suffocate, that he’s getting more than enough air right now, he just needs to calm down. Calm down, Barton. You’ve got nothing to gain by working yourself up. 

The car comes to a stop surprisingly soon. Twenty minutes tops, his internal clock tells him. He hears the front doors open and close. The cold air that invades the car carries with it a heavy smell of fish and briny sea water. Waterfront, then. Fish processing. There are any number of places close by that fit that description around, so it doesn’t really tell him anything. He hears voices. New voices. He’s still trying to figure out how many more assholes have joined the party when the backseat door opens. A second later, hands grab him and flip him over. The back of his head cracks painfully against the doorstep as they drag him out of the car, and that hit must have scrambled his brain pretty good, because things go a little flickery, a little lopsided all over, and next thing he knows he’s inside somewhere, being hauled through a solid looking metal door. His head pounds and aches, and that's probably a minor concussion. Just what he needs right now.

Bright, commercial grade light fixtures pass overhead as he’s dragged deeper into the building. The light hurts his eyes. It’s colder in there than outside, and the stink of fish grows stronger. Yep, he thinks dizzily, fish processing plant, because the low-frequent hum of refrigeration units is all around, and there are industrial sized freezer doors all along the wide center isle that they’re taking him down. He hopes he’s not going to end up dismembered in one of them. He’s not loving his odds.   

Their little posse stops. He hangs boneless between two of the newcomers as a third pounds his fist twice against a hollow sounding, metal door.

The door opens a few seconds later.   

“Bring him in,” a woman says.

It’s just three words, but it’s enough for Clint to hear a hint of an accent, an almost imperceptible hardness to the consonants. Eastern Europe, he thinks.

With the way his head flops forward, he can’t see much, but his peripheral vision still works and gives him a sense of the place. Decent sized room. Thirty by thirty feet, maybe. Just as brightly lit as the rest of the facility. As he’s dragged forward, he sees the feet of two people at the other end of the room. The heels and sheer nylons tell him the one to the left is a woman. Probably the one who spoke. Standing slightly behind her and to the left is a man. Shiny black shoes. Expensive-looking but practical. Black pants. Massive frame. Clint thinks he’s wearing a black suit jacket as well, and his mind pins the label ‘bodyguard’ on the man.

But the two of them only holds his attention for a split second, because he catches a glimpse of something else, and Clint feels a sharp stab of something that’s very close to honest to God fear.   

It looks like an operating table.

Please, please, let him be mistaken, let it be a really wonky regular table, a work bench or something, but as he’s taken closer he realizes that no, he’s not mistaken. It’s an operating table. A fucking operating table, and as they dump him on it Clint tries again to break the hold of the drugs, tries to push back, to dig his heels in and fight, because operating tables are not his friend, especially not in a situation like this, and what the hell is an operating table doing in a fish factory anyway? What the hell is going on? But it’s no use, and they arrange his arms and legs on the table without him being able to even twitch.

His head falls limply to the side, away from the door, and he hates not being able to keep the assholes that attacked him in sight, but he can’t do anything about it. At least he’s getting a better look at the woman and her bodyguard. She’s out of focus, but he sees enough to tell she’s in her fifties. He then adjusts his approximation to late fifties, because there are subtle but sure signs of surgical maintenance. Light brown, shoulder length hair, graying but dyed, light complexion, vaguely Slavic looking bone structure and nose. Together with the accent he’s now pretty sure he’s right about Eastern Europe, but he needs more to be able to pinpoint her origin further. He also needs more to be fully certain it’s not a red herring, that she’s not trying to throw him off her scent with a fake ethnic identity.

Her heels click against the concrete as she approaches the table. She stands for a long moment looking down at him. A whiff of perfume reaches him, heavy and sweet and powdery smelling. All he sees is a blur of blue as her jacket a few inches in front of his face.

“This is him? Are you sure?”  

“It’s him alright. It’s Clint fucking Barton,” Clint hears broken nose guy say from the door. He sounds nasal and pissed off. Serves the asshole right for stealing his watch. He’s getting that watch back. Phil gave it to him.  

The woman’s hand is warm on his cheek as she turns his head to face her. The back of his abused skull throbs and aches as it shifts against the table, but he can do nothing but endure. She leans a little closer. His focus is stubbornly locked in the middle distance, so he can’t be sure, but he thinks her eyes are gray. 

“I’ve waited so long,” she tells him quietly and softly, like she’s sharing a secret, but something about her voice makes Clint think about deeply buried rage and violence waiting to happen.

And unfortunately, it looks like it will happen to him.

Who the hell is this woman? What has she been waiting for? ‘Revenge’ comes high on Clint’s list of guesses, but revenge for what?

She straightens up and makes a gesture with her arm at someone Clint can’t see. “Let us get started.”

No. No, let us not. Clint is definitely in no rush to get started with whatever the hell this is, but the woman steps around the table to Clint’s other side. He hears the rustle of people repositioning themselves in the room. 

“Ready?” someone asks.

“Yes,” the woman replies, and from his right Clint hears a faint click and a sound he can’t quite identify. She stands silent and unmoving next to him for a long time, and Clint is starting to get seriously antsy when she finally speaks again. “This is me settling a score,” she says.

Yeah? Which score, he wants to ask, because he’s stacked up about a thousand potential ones over the years.

“What have you done to him,” Natasha’s flat, angry voice says from a speaker somewhere to his right, and Clint has a moment of blank ‘what the hell?’, because Natasha is working, she’s on a job, and he doesn’t understand how she already knows he’s been taken. It’s been less than an hour. A lot less than an hour. Shit. Something occurs to him. Did he lose time somewhere along the way? More than the seconds he thought he had been knocked out when they brought him out of the car?

But why Natasha? Is it a play for an exchange of some kind. Exchange of intel? Money? The release of someone SHIELD has in custody, maybe? But if it’s something to do with SHIELD, why is Natasha the point of contact? SHIELD doesn’t negotiate for agents taken hostage, but there are times civilians are involved and when there’s a need to simply buy time, and they have hostage negotiators on call 24/7 for that purpose. All of them better suited for the job than Natasha. How the hell did they get a hold of her, anyway? Clint aches to turn his head, to look in the direction of Natasha’s voice, because he suspects there’s probably a TV screen somewhere, or a computer screen, and he really wouldn’t mind seeing a familiar face right about now.

“Don’t worry. He’s alive,” the woman says. She knocks her knuckles lightly against Clint’s forehead. “And awake. He is just… unable to participate right now.”

“He better stay alive.” The warning is clear.

“I have to admit it feels a little strange, this,” the woman says. “I have spent so many years searching. I looked everywhere, I hired the best of the best, I had them track down every rumor, every whisper, and it never amounted to anything. But now—“

“Ivica Antic,” Natasha interrupts, and Clint just knows she deliberately waited until the woman had gotten started with what is apparently some long, dramatic backstory. She’s upsetting the balance of power that this woman is trying to establish. “Born 1959 in Novi Sad to Vanja and Milos Vranjes.”

So Clint had been right on the money. Eastern Europe. Croatia. He’d pat himself on the back if he wasn’t, you know, paralyzed.

“One sister, three brothers,” Natasha continues. “Graduated from Sveučilište u Zagrebu, magistra znanosti iz arhitekture.” She segues seamlessly from English into Croatian, and Clint has enough of a basic South Slavic vocabulary to understand key words. Natasha is calmly listing this woman’s life’s history; places she lived, boyfriends and fiancées, the hushed up teenage pregnancy, jobs held, academic publications, the first husband who killed himself, the second husband, a fellow scientist and in the field of nanophysics, confined to 24-hour care after an unfortunate workplace accident in ’03 left him paraplegic and brain damaged.

Clint’s brain lines up the situation with that last little morsel of information and comes to an unsettling conclusion. Natasha had something to do with that ‘accident’. 

“Enough,” Antic snaps, and Natasha smoothly stops her info dump. She manages to do it in such a way that it’s clear that she’s in no way giving in to the barked order, but rather that she is satisfied that she has made her point. Which is that she knows everything about this woman, and this bitch better not hurt Clint or she’ll be in a world of hurt.

At least that’s what he hopes it means.

“I could have had him killed, you know.” Clint feels Antic’s hand run down his arm and he wants to pull away from the touch, it makes his ice cold skin crawl. “I could have told them to shoot him in the head. But I didn’t. Do you know why?”

Natasha waits.

“Because I want to educate you.” Antic picks up his left hand from the table, the one with the broken fingers. Her touch is feather light, but it hurts like a bitch anyway. “I knew it wasn’t an accident right away, because Anton had told me he suspected that someone had put out a contract on him. But you failed. You didn’t kill him.” She puts Clint’s hand down, arranges it across his chest.

Clint knows she’s wrong about the ‘failed’ part. This whole thing dates back to a time before Natasha had joined SHIELD, back to the days when she had been living from shadow to shadow, on the run from the Red Room. But if anything, she had been even more ruthless back then, and he knows without a shadow of a doubt that if this man really was Natasha’s target and she left him alive, then it was because she meant to leave him alive all along. In exactly the condition she left him in. Spending a lifetime as a semi-sentient vegetable had to be its own kind of hell.  

Antic goes on. “I had no idea who you were back then. I just knew you were a contract killer. I had no name, no face, no hometown, or even nationality. But there were whispers. Rumors. The Black Widow. I spent a long time researching you, and for the longest time there was nothing. Nothing at all. But then SHIELD’s dirty laundry was aired and...” She makes a motion like she grabs something from the air. “There it was. A point to start. I paid a lot of money for little scraps here and there, and this, Ms. Romanoff, is what I found. You have no family. No husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, fiancée, dog, cat, goldfish. No friends. No attachments.” Antic pauses. “But a partner." Her voice goes soft. "You have a partner. One you seem rather fond of.”

As she speaks, Antic positions Clint's head so he’s facing away from her. It lets him see the TV screen by the far wall. Natasha is sitting down, her hands are clasped on the desk in front of her. He sees a plain white wall behind her. No windows, no paintings or decorations of any kind, no natural light. It’s all deliberately bland and non-descript, she’s not giving any hints about her location, not even the slightest indication of the time of day where she is. Clint struggles to focus just a little better. He needs to see her eyes clearly, needs to read what she can’t say out loud, because he’s getting pretty fucking concerned here. Nat, please tell me you magically have pinpointed my location and you’re about to crash this fucked up party any moment. 

Antic picks up his hand again, and motherfucking son of a bitch, lady, would you please stop doing that, he wants to beg.

She leans over him. “She will know what I have lived for the past twelve years. I will take something she holds dear and return it broken beyond repair. I’m sorry it has to be you, but you are the only thing I have found in her life that she doesn’t considered replaceable or expendable.”

“I did that to your husband,” Natasha says from the screen. “Not Barton. You want me.”  

“No. I don’t.”

Something cold and sharp closes around his middle finger. Clint’s brain goes straight to flailing panic, he fucking panics, because he can’t turn his head to see, but that feels like blades, like bolt cutters, and Jesus Christ, that crazy bitch is going to cut his finger off, she’s going to do it, and he can’t move. He can’t stop her.

“Your partner uses his hands a lot, doesn’t he?”

On the screen Natasha shoots to her feet. “No, don’t,” she shouts, raising her hand sharply, and all he can think is that he needs his fingers to shoot. Please don’t do it. Don’t do it. Natasha, stop her, don’t let her. Then the cutters close on his finger and Clint screams without sound, without movement as there’s a snap and a sick crunching sound. He distantly feels his hand being released. It flops over the side of the table, hangs limply over the edge.

The sound of heavy wetness hitting the floor underneath the table starts up, blood dripping from his hand, and he feels sick, so sick.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This part is brutal. More so than chapter one. I'm not kidding, guys. 
> 
> Comfort kittens can be picked up in isle 4, next to the chocolate and the booze.

Clint lies there, paralyzed and frozen and unable to do anything but watch Natasha and listen to the wet sound of his own blood hitting the floor. His finger, his brain screams, she cut off his finger. On the screen across the room Natasha is pale, she looks sick and furious. She clenches her fingers into a fist, then uncurls them and curls them again, like she doesn’t know what to do, how to react or process what she saw.

We’re coming, her fingers are telling him. We’re close. Hold on.

But it’s too late. It’s already too late, because she cut off his finger. Clint feels tears leak from his unblinking eyes, hot against his ice cold skin.

“No matter where you hide I will find you,” Natasha growls. “I will find you and kill you.”

Antic hums. “We’ll see about that. Is he here?” From the way her tone changes, Clint knows that last part wasn’t aimed at Natasha.

“He just arrived,” someone answers from behind.

“Bring him in.”

Clint has no idea who ‘he’ is, or why he is here, but given the situation he’s pretty sure he doesn’t want to know. A moment later he hears the door open, hears muted, muffled voices, and then the dry sound of shoes shuffling over the gritty floor.

“Wrap that,” Antic says. “I don’t want him to bleed out.” 

Someone raises Clint’s mangled, mutilated hand, and he feels the warm, heavy flow of blood run down the back of it as it follows gravity towards his wrist and in under his sleeve. The pain is less excruciating than he expected, even the broken bones don’t hurt as bad as a moment ago. An upside of going into shock, he thinks dimly. As his hand is maneuvered around he gets a mental flash of what it must look like; the swelling, the crooked fingers, the dripping blood, the nothingness where— His mind recoils from that, slides back to safer territory, to Natasha’s face on the screen.

It takes a few minutes before they’re done with his hand, and all the while Natasha is trying to negotiate, to bargain, and Clint latches on to the sound of her voice, to her words, because he’s sinking here, he’s at the mercy of a madwoman on a mission, and he doesn’t want to be the mission. He’s supposed to be the one carrying out the mission, that’s always been what he does. Get the job done. Take down the target whatever way necessary. And he’s good at it. He’s _good_ at it. Will he still be good at it if he comes out of this alive? He remembers Natasha’s clinical listing of Antic’s husband’s injuries. Will there be enough of Clint left to be good at anything at all?

His hand is placed back by his side on the table and bony fingers grab his chin, turns his head to the front again. Clint feels a flash of panic when Natasha disappears out of sight. The man leaning over him is hunched and wrinkled by age. Behind the round glasses his eyes are red rimmed and rheumy. A stethoscope hangs around his neck. Clint thinks it’s must be the situation that makes him think of Joseph Mengele. It must be, because he has no idea what Joseph Mengele actually looked like, and Jesus, brain, don’t go there, don’t go thinking about sadistic doctors and horrible medical experiments and helpless prisoners.

The man pulls something from his front pocket and moves it in front of Clint’s face. It takes Clint’s unfocused eyes a moment to identify it as a pen. A regular Bic ballpoint pen. He tries and fails to follow it with his eyes as it moves from left to right, in and out of his field of vision. A second later the man changes his grip on the pen, and everything in Clint except his body flinches hard as he stabs it hard at Clint’s eye.

But the sharp point of the pen never reaches his eye, the man stops and Clint lies there feeling his lashes touch it when he blinks. Cold sweat breaks out all over.

No. Please don’t. 

The man straightens up with a groan. “Faint eye movements. He’s coming out of it. This wears off almost as fast as it starts to work, so I would recommend either strapping him down or administering more.”

Clint has no idea what the old man saw, because it sure as hell doesn’t feel like it’s wearing off, he still doesn’t have the slightest bit of control of his body.

“Tie him down,” Antic orders and Clint’s lax limbs are repositioned and secured to the table with thick padded straps. Arms, wrists, ankles, thighs, chest. Even if he were to magically recover his ability to move, he’s not going anywhere. Antic leans over him, blocking out the bright light from overhead. “I think we should do something about your other hand,” she says. “I read somewhere that you’re ambidextrous.” She places his limp hand on his chest and gives it a pat. “But on second thought, I think we’ll wait with that. We have other, more important things on the agenda.”

She gives his cheek a light push with her fingers and his head falls to the side again, and he’s so fucking grateful because it means he can see Natasha on that screen again.

Please be close. Please be close. Please be here _now_.

On the screen Natasha is still on her feet. Her hands are pressed flat against the table, and she’s leaning towards the camera like she’s poised to attack. But despite the aggressive stance there’s something stony and dead in her eyes that scares him so much, because whatever she’s watching, whatever is going on where Clint can’t see, it must be pretty bad to make her look like that. He hears more movement, hears metal scraping across the floor, thuds, then there are brutal hands on his head, pressing the side of his face more securely against the table.

“Don’t do it,” Natasha grinds out. Her eyes find Clint’s for a moment, then they flick up and away again. “Don’t—“

Antic apparently isn’t interested in anything Natasha has to say, because she orders “Mute” and Natasha is cut off in mid-word.

Clint sees her mouth move for another couple of seconds before she must realize she’s been muted, then she slaps her hands against the desk in what looks like frustration and anger and stands up sharply. His breath hitches a fraction, departing a little from the even, slow rhythm dictated by the drugs. No, don’t leave, his brain cries when she turns around, but she swivels back towards the camera again before she has even completed the turn. Please, don’t leave me alone here.

Something cold touches his ear, and the old man must be right, the drugs have to be wearing off a little, because a fractured, pathetic sound come out. But it’s too late, he thinks as he tries and fails again to move, it’s too little, too late. Whatever they’re putting in his ear is cold and sharp, and it hurts as it goes deeper. God, that’s what she meant, they’re going to lobotomize him, they’re going put something in there and mess up his brain, leave him just like Antic’s husband.

The brutal hands press the side of his face harder against the table and he knows this is it.

And he’s right. Natasha’s mouth open in a sharp, soundless shout a split-second before the side of his head lights up with a bolt of pain like he’s never felt before. He hears, he _feels_ a sick crunching sound in his head as they drive whatever it is deep into his ear by brute force. The world grays out for a second. He hears himself wheeze, raggedly, continuously. It sounds weirdly muted to his ears.

The fingers on his face tighten again, they dig deep and hard into muscle and bone, but that pain is nothing compared to the next stab of jagged, high voltage agony that runs through his head.

On the screen Natasha is making those shorthand signs again. _Hold on. We’re coming. We’re on our way._ She makes them overtly and clearly this time, no subterfuge. Clint’s hand, still resting on his chest where Antic put it, twitches a fraction as he tries to reach out to the TV screen and to Natasha. The hands on him suddenly disappear, but there’s no room for relief, because they return to position his head to the other side, away from the screen and Natasha. He feels warm blood pool under his head as they press the other side of his face against the table again, exposing his other ear.  

“It will be over soon,” he hears Antic say, and she sounds like she’s genuinely trying to comfort him, but Clint isn’t comforted, because she promised that by the time she is done he’ll be reduced to something broken and useless and helpless, and he doesn’t want to be that. He can’t become that.   

He feels the same cold, sharp touch pressing into of his other ear, and there is no respite, no mercy.

This time when the pain comes, Clint checks out on the whole horrible thing completely.         

He must not have been gone long, because when he comes back to himself he’s still gasping, still awash with pain and fear and horror, and the overwhelming sense of wrongness. It’s silent. He can’t hear. Not his own ragged breathing, not the sounds he knows he’s making, not the people who move around him, there’s just a flat, ungraspable absence of sound. He wonders distantly how deep they shoved whatever it was into his head, because he feels hazy and disoriented, the only thing bright and clear is the pain. Is this what brain damage feels like?

Antic appears in his field of vision, and he sees her lips move, sees her look over at the screen and smile. Clint starts to shake. It starts as a mild tremor that soon spreads and grows until soon he’s shivering uncontrollably, his body finally allowed to react to the horror, finally starting breaking free from the drugs. But he still can’t move, can’t escape. For now all he can do is shake.

The old man bends over him again. There’s a small bottle in his hand. An eye dropper in the other. As scared as he had been when they’d gone for his ears, it’s got nothing on the panic that overtakes him when he realizes what they’re going to do. He tries desperately to turn his head away, and he actually manages to shift a tiny bit, but a hand on his forehead stops him.

It’s the work of seconds to drip the liquid in his eyes. The effect is instantaneous, it feels like acid, like sharpened nails and broken glass, and the pain merges and twines with that in his ears, in his head, in his hand, and he knows he screams, he knows he does, but he can’t hear it. He feels the hands that hold his head let go, but he doesn’t care, because his eyes, what did they do to his eyes, he can’t see. His brain throws words like sulfuric acid and hydrochloric acid at him, reminds him of all the corrosive and caustic and toxic substances used in drain cleaners. All the while he can _feel_ it eating away at his eyes, burning through the retina, blinding him.

He struggles to blink, to squeeze his eyes shut and try to soothe away the overwhelming pain. It hurts. It hurts so fucking bad, and Jesus Christ, he can’t see. He can’t see anything. There’s nothing. No distinction between light and dark, no movement, no colors, nothing. He feels lightheaded, like he’s going to pass out, and please, please let him pass out. Let him get away from this horrible nightmare.  

But he doesn’t pass out. He has no idea how much time passes, but for a while nothing happens. The aching boundaries of his body have become his entire world, there’s just a void beyond it, but he knows it’s populated by Antic and her henchmen and more pain. He tries to figure out where they are, but the floor is concrete and doesn’t transmit any vibrations. He can still imagine them moving around him, talking about what they’re going to do next, preparing for it. He tries to curl up, but even though he can move just a little now, the restraints won’t let him. At least he can squeeze his eyes shut now. It doesn’t help much, but he does it anyway.   

Fingers suddenly close around the wrist of his good hand and Clint flinches hard. His eyes fly open without volition, and the pain of red hot nails being driven into them flare up. With a cry he squeezes them shut again. He curls his fingers tightly into a fist and pulls weakly, futilely at the restrains. Not another finger, he needs his fingers, _he needs them_. He waits for them to pry his fist open, knowing he won’t be able to stop them. Please don’t take another one, he begs.

There’s a touch on his neck. Are they going to take his voice? Destroy his vocal cords. Sever his spinal cord. Could they do it without killing him? That was the end game, wasn’t it? Return him to Natasha broken but alive. Just like she had left Antic’s husband.

The touch on his neck disappears. The hand around his wrist doesn’t, and waiting for pain is almost as bad as the pain itself, it can break you down just as much. That’s what they teach in RTI trainings, and maybe that’s what they’re doing, he thinks dimly, maybe they’re adding a little psychological edge to the whole experience. 

It takes a while for his messed up brain to realize that the fingers on his wrist are tapping lightly on his skin. Just tapping. It’s same short cadence, again and again, and finally his brain makes the right connection. He knows that pattern.

He has known it for years.

He lifts his head a fraction, trying to figure out where this person is. “Natasha?” His lips are still numb and the sounds feel wrong in his mouth. He tries again. “Nat?”

Double tap. 'No'. The grip on his wrist shifts and his hand is turned over. A finger starts drawing something on the back of it, but it takes three attempts before Clint can decipher the slow figure.

It’s a P.

“Phil,” he breathes.

Single tap. ‘Yes’.

There’s tugging on the restraints that hold him down, and it doesn’t take long before they fall away. Clint fumbles for Phil with his good hand. The relief of being able to move, albeit slowly and clumsily, is almost as strong as knowing they have come for him. They’re here. Phil is here.   

A moment later he realizes there are other people around him, too many points of contact suddenly, too many hands are touching him, maneuvering his body, tugging lightly at the injured hand he’s pressing so tightly against his chest, and he fucking loses it. He doesn’t know how he manages, but he twists and suddenly he’s toppling over into nothingness. Hands grab frantically at his arm and his clothes, but gravity and momentum join forces and he goes over the edge of the table, crashing into the floor below.  

His body is still heavy and his coordination is still fucked up, but he somehow manages to get to his knees. They can’t have any more of him, he won’t let them have more. The floor rolls under him, and he almost topples over. Everything spins, everything hurts, harsh and dull and deep and sharp, all pains overlaid on top of each other. Someone touches his arm and he lashes out, but he hits nothing but air. He feels the cold metal base of the table behind his back and he twists, curls up against it. He wraps his good arm around it and he holds on, cowering in the absolute nothingness that presses in from all directions.  

Then he remembers that Phil is there, somewhere. Phil won’t let them hurt him.

“Coulson?” he croaks, the sound nothing but a vibration in his chest and throat. "Phil?" He tries to crack his eyes open a fraction, but they hurt too much, he can’t. Even though he’s waiting for it, he recoils from the touch when it returns. He forces himself to stay where he is, because that’s Phil. It’s Phil and Clint needs him. Right now his sanity depends on it.

Clint holds his breath while the fingers start moving against the back of his hand again.

‘P’ 

He takes a wobbly breath. “Phil.”    

Single tap. Clint feels more letters being traced against his skin.

‘Safe’.

Clint abandons his hold on the table and fumbles for Phil again, finds him and falls against him.

Phil’s arm comes around Clint’s shoulders and pulls him closer. Clint recognizes the feel of body armor under his cheek, recognizes the wide Velcro straps that fasten across Phil’s shoulders. He can feel the smell of a recently fired weapon. Phil’s arm around him is warm, and Clint is so grateful, he has never been this cold in his whole life. His teeth are chattering, but he tries to tell Phil what they did, they need to know what Antic did if they’re going to help him. He can feel the words fracturing and splintering as they leave his lips, pulled apart by the shaking.  

‘Safe’, Phil’s fingers say again.

Clint tightens his grip as Phil starts to move. He knows he needs medical attention, knows he needs a hospital and doctors and drugs, but he doesn’t want to move, it feels safer to stay here on the floor with the table above, with Phil on one side and the wide table base on the other. He knows Phil would never leave him here, not like this, but he feels like there’s nothing between him and dangerpainthreatpainfear. They can treat his injuries right there, right? He knows perfectly well they can’t, but he allows himself to want it anyway.

All too soon Phil untangles himself from Clint. But he doesn't let go. Gently but firmly he coaxes Clint to sit up. Other people (safe, Clint tries to remind himself, safe) guide him backward and down on what he assumes is a stretcher. There’s jostling and sharp impacts on the frame that he thinks is probably things locking in place. Phil’s hand on his squeeze lightly and then he feels the stretcher and himself being raised from the floor. It’s smooth and careful, but Clint suddenly he feels like he’s falling. His bad hand smacks into something or someone as he flails out for something more to grab, and for a moment that pain goes to the top of the horrible list.    

When the pain subsides a fraction and gravity starts behaving again they’re strapping him down. He feels straps fasten across his hips. Something else comes to rest over his chest. No, don’t tie me down, he tries to say, and Phil’s fingers start moving over his arm again. Clint tries to figure out what he’s trying to say, and it takes way too long for his fucked up brain to understand that Phil is not spelling anything, he’s just stroking. Petting. Comforting.

They don’t remove the straps, but no more are added. Then they’re moving. He can feel it. Phil walks next to him, and Clint doesn’t care if the whole world sees his white-knuckled hold on him. He’s not falling anymore, but the silent darkness around him is spinning, slowly and continuously, like he has had too much to drink and he’s lying in bed. But he’s not drunk, is he? And he’s not in his bed, he’s in pain, bleeding and broken in a fucking fish processing factory. 

They’re working around him. Something cold and smooth slide in under the cuff of his left sleeve, way too close to his fucked up fingers for comfort, and he presses the hand closer to his chest, tries to angle away. Whatever it is follows, and as the fabric of his jacket falls away he realizes it’s a pair of scissors. Fingers press lightly against the pulse point on his wrist. He knows it’s not Phil, the fingers are too small, too delicate. Natasha? He must have said it out loud, because Phil taps ‘no’, and slowly spells ‘Med’. Clint tries not to be devastated. Of course Natasha isn’t there. She would have been the first by his side if she had been there.

He tenses again when they coax his bad hand away from his body. They’re infinitely careful, but it’s still horrible when they unwrap whatever those assholes had bandaged him up with. He starts to shake harder, and for a moment he thinks it’s him, but then he recognizes the sensation and he latches on to that, because thinking about the state of his hand is too much, too horrible. He concentrates on the vibrations that grow around him, slowly morphing into something deeper and stronger, something he has felt hundreds of times. There’s a dull jolt and then a different sensation of moving that tells him he’s right. He has no idea when it happened, but he’s in a jet. Or a helicopter. Something with massive engines and an extreme number of horse powers, because that’s what that is, engine vibrations.

They do something that jostles his hand, and his mind flashes images of the missing finger, of the blood and gaping wound where it should be, and he chokes on the sobs that crowd up at the back of his throat. Phil’s grip around his good hand tightens for a moment. Fuck stoic, Clint thinks when Phil’s other hand comes to rest on the top of his head. He’s done being stoic, he was done the moment they cut off his finger, _beyond_ done when they started skewering his brain and took his eyes. He’s just done. Period.  

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a bit less intense than the two first ones. Thank god!

Phil’s phone rings.

“I’m at the airport,” Natasha says before he has a chance to speak. “I touch down at noon. Where is he?”

“SHIELD. Green wing.” Phil looks at the door that just minutes earlier had swung shut behind the large team of doctors and nurses and technicians that had surrounded Clint on the moving stretcher.

“Status?” Natasha asks.   

Phil looks at the blood soaked bandages lying on the stainless steel tray, at the medical scissors that had cut them off. Every flat surface is littered with ripped, one-time use sterile pouches and packaging. A few bloody wipes and gauze compresses have fallen to the floor, joining Clint’s jacket and shirt there. Heavy drops of blood pockmark the floor where the stretcher had been standing for the first twenty minutes, while they had made the primary assessment and gotten enough sedatives in Clint to make it possible for Phil to extricate himself without a full-blown panic attack on his hands. It’s not much blood, not in comparison to what Phil has seen in other situations, but it makes his stomach tighten sickly.

“Phil?”

The brittle note in Natasha’s voice brings him back to their call.

“Yeah. Sorry, I’m here. He’s sedated. They just took him away to continue evaluating the damage and try to do something about his hand.” He sits down heavily on the lone chair in the corner. The stillness that fills the room is a jarring contrast to the activity that had descended on Clint the moment he was brought from the helicopter pad.

The sound of the busy airport around Natasha filters through the phone. He’s not directly involved in her present operation, so he shouldn’t know her whereabouts, but he does. She’s in Frankfurt. She has been there for two weeks, and Phil had known immediately that something was seriously wrong when she had called him, fuck procedures and mission protocol. She had told him about the message from Antic that Stark had relayed, that Antic had Clint and that if Natasha wanted him back she needed to set up a video call within the hour.

Phil should be concerned that SHIELD still hasn’t managed to find a way to shut JARVIS out, that Tony Stark apparently still can get deep enough into the systems to somehow find Natasha on a job and get a message through, but right now he’s just grateful. To Stark and his A.I., because despite some pretty advanced counter-measures on Antic’s part, JARVIS had been able to locate the geographic source of the video stream within minutes from when it was initiated. Phil had listened in on the rapidly deteriorating situation that played out over the video link while setting up an emergency extraction team.

It had turned out that Antic hadn’t taken Clint far, just nine miles, and the assault team had breached the door to the room exactly forty-four minutes later. But it had been too late, because by then Clint had been blinded, deafened, and mutilated.  

“Tell me,” Natasha demands quietly.

“His right hand is fine, no injuries. But the left…” Phil had gotten a brief glance when the medics had removed the bandages in the helicopter. The discolored swelling and misalignments of the bones had been glaringly obvious. Even more glaring had been the absence of a large part of Clint’s middle finger. “Two badly broken fingers,” he tells Natasha. “They think at least one is a complex break. The middle finger was severed above the second knuckle. They’re going to try to reattach it.”

“What are the odds?” It’s clear from the tone of her voice that she expects bad news. 

Phil glances towards the door again, wills them to bring Clint back fast. “There’s usually a six-hour window,” he tells her, parroting the surgeon who had been standing by when they arrived. “We’re well within that.” He doesn’t have to tell her that even if it takes, permanent nerve damage and reduced mobility is more or less guaranteed. He runs his hand through his hair, then smoothes it down. “I tried to set you up with a ride back home.” He wants her to know that he had tried, even though he had been sure what the answer would be before he even made the call. Natasha’s expertise had not been essential for the operation in question, Barton had already retrieved anyway, and even decade-long partnerships didn’t buy you an exclusive express ride across the Atlantic. “No go. I’m sorry.” 

“Thanks for trying.”

The ambient buzz of the airport is interrupted by the sound of a tinny gong. Phil heats a male voice say   _Sicherheitshinweis._ The rest of the pre-recorded security announcement drowns in the sound of young excited voices suddenly close and loud, but Phil has heard it enough times to know it by heart, even the German version.

“He can still shoot without that finger,” Natasha suddenly says. “His draw and release will be unaffected. He can still shoot.” Her voice is stronger, more confident, more like the woman Phil knows so well, but he hears what’s hiding under the statement, hears the unvoiced need for him to agree with her. To reassure her there is still some hope that things could work out okay.

Phil sighs and wishes he had some reassurance to give, but he doesn’t and he won’t lie to her. Not about this. “It’s too soon to tell.” 

She goes silent again, and Phil pictures her in the middle of the busy airport, phone pressed to her ear, looking on the surface just as cool and collected as usual, like she’s just talking to someone about next day’s plans or what to have for dinner, but he knows it’s all a façade. 

“The surgeons here are the best there is,” Phil says, because he can’t tell her things will be okay, but he can give her something to hold onto. “They’re doing everyth—“

“I have to go through security,” she says abruptly. “I’ll call when I’m on the ground.”

Phil’s phone beeps as she ends the call. 

“Agent Coulson?”

He looks up as a nurse steps into the treatment room. He pockets the phone and gets to his feet. "Yes?"

"You are Barton’s handler, right?” 

“Yes. And his medical proxy.”   

The nurse holds out her hand. “Then maybe you could make sure these don’t get lost.”

Phil steps closer. Resting in her palm he sees the thin silver chain Clint usually wears around his neck when not on a job, along with a bracelet made from childish, lettered beads.

He nods. “Of course.”  

He holds out his hand and the nurse lets the two items slide from her palm to his. Several segments of the bracelet are dark with dried blood, but Phil recognizes it. It’s old, well-loved and often worn. The beads spell 'FUCK CANCER'. Clint had shown it to Phil many years ago and had animatedly told him that the money collected from the sales of bracelets like his went to cancer research. Clint had looked proud and pleased with himself. It’s like, I don’t know, like I’m supporting life, he had tried to explain after a long description of what kind of things the money could help with. He had still been smiling when he said it, but Phil had noted the subtle change in his body language, the faintly challenging tilt to his chin. It’s just a nice feeling, is all, Clint had added. I mean, with the life I’ve had.

Phil had been puzzled by it, but he had realized later that Clint had been worried that Phil would tell him it was ridiculous, that his desire to balance the violence with something life-affirming was stupid. That evening Phil had gone online and bought a bracelet, too. A black and white version to offset Clint’s brightly colored one. When it arrived he had put it on before leaving for the office the next morning. He had spent the day making sure it didn’t peek out from under his sleeve - he had a reputation to maintain, after all - but that afternoon, during a briefing of an upcoming job, he had pushed his sleeve up a fraction and shown it to Clint under the table. The high-watt smile had definitely been worth the eighteen dollars plus shipping he had paid for it.

"Thank you," he says belatedly and looks up, but the nurse has already left.

Phil slips the necklace into his pocket and carefully slides the elastic bracelet around his wrist.

For safekeeping.

*   *   *

He’s directed to the waiting area. Another nurse comes by two hours later. From her attire Phil realizes she’s coming straight from the OR and his stomach clenches sickly. There’s no way they’re already done, not with the injuries Clint has. She apparently sees the tension in him, because she lifts her hand before she’s halfway across the room.

“I’m not here as a bringer of bad news. Everything is going according to plan so far.” 

“How is he?”

“As well as can be expected. We have three specialist teams working around each other to address his injuries.” She pulls the surgical cap off and tucks it into a pocket of the gown. “I’ll start with the good news. It looks like the damage to his eyes is less severe than we feared. We see little actual damage to the corneas.”

Phil is so relieved he actually feels a little shaky.

She sits down in one of the chairs with a tired groan. She angles herself towards him. “They haven’t started with his ears yet. They’re waiting for the eye team to finish up first, but the neurosurgeons have started working on the severed finger. When they’re done they’ll start to sort out the fractures, stabilize the breaks.”

“How much longer?”

“Hard to say. It depends on what they find. I would say at least another couple of hours on his hand. Then the rest. So, five hours, maybe more.”

Phil nods. He knew it wasn’t going to be quick.

She puts a light hand on his arm. “You should go get something to eat. Get a few hours of rest. You look like you could use it.” 

Phil glances past her at the clock on the far wall. It’s a few minutes past 4 a.m. He wants to refuse. Every cell in his body wants to stay, but he knows she’s right, he’s dead on his feet and he’s not helping Clint by sitting here and staring at the wall. 

“He won’t be awake before you get back,” she reassures him, then gives him a wry smile. “Trust me, we want you here when he wakes up just as much as you do.” 

Phil wishes he could pretend just for a moment that this could be compared to the two times Clint has actually come out of anesthesia badly, that this time, too, it will be over in a few minutes when the worst of the confusion settles and Clint recognizes his environment, registers Phil’s (or Natasha’s, or Hill’s, or someone else that the most base parts of his brain recognizes as safe) presence and is able to relax back into hazy half-sleep for another couple of hours.

He knows that this time it will be different.

“You have my number. If I’m not back, please call me when he’s out of surgery.”

She gets to her feet. “Of course.”

Phil stands up, too. He pulls his jacket back on. But he still hesitates, held back by the instinct to stay and keep watch.

“Agent Barton is in good hands,” she says gently. “The best.”

“I know.” Phil checks the clock again. “If I’m back by nine he will still be out?”

“He will on enough painkillers to stay asleep for a great many hours longer than that.” She gives him a final pat on the arm, then leaves.

Phil finally manages to tear himself away. As he walks to the garage, he wonders if he’ll still be reduced to tapping out messages on Clint’s skin when he wakes up. There’s a little slice of hope after hearing the news about his eyes, but there’s no knowing yet. He watches the floor lights in the elevator on his way down and tries very hard to not think about the sounds he heard over the radio link towards the end when Clint was starting to come out of it, or think about the deliberately neutral voice-over from the SHIELD operator who was providing a real time report about what was happening in the screen while Phil and the team were racing to find Clint.

He doesn’t believe in fairytales and happy endings, but as he gets into the car he desperately wants to. 

*    *    *

When Phil’s alarm goes off four hours later he drags himself out of bed feeling nowhere near rested enough. He grabs a quick shower and downs an Advil for the low-grade headache that hasn’t been chased away by sleep. Before heading out he picks up the field gear he had simply dropped on the bathroom floor before heading to bed. He folds them and puts them to the side to be washed. The black fabric is stiff with dried blood in places where Clint had pressed against him.

When he arrives at SHIELD, he stops by the room that houses the task force already set up and running at full speed. Phil figures he must look as tired as he feels, because as he walks in one of the agents gets up and pours a cup of coffee and pushes it into his hand without a word. Phil nods in thanks and sips the hot, bitter liquid.

The area is buzzing with activity. The tech teams are analyzing the original message, the streamed video, tracing the phone calls and wireless connections of everyone within half a mile of the location. Other teams are collecting footage from every working surveillance camera and traffic camera in the area, trying to identify the rest of the participants and map their movements. The financial investigators are going through every aspect of Antic’s finances, along with those of the fish processing business and the owner of the building. They need to figure out if Antic was operating alone or if someone was hiding in the metaphorical shadows, using her drive for vengeance as a means to an end. It wouldn’t be the first time.    

Phil is talking to one of the team leaders, asking about progress and strategies when Sitwell comes up behind him, puts his hands on Phil’s shoulders and steers him out of the room.

“We’ve got it, Coulson. Go to Barton.”  

Phil doesn’t protest too much.

Half an hour later he steps back into the medical facility, paperwork and laptop case in his hand, because he knows he’s going to be here for a while and as much as he would like to, he can’t ignore the work that is piled up on his desk. He settles down in the waiting area again. The duty nurse tells him the surgeons are just about finished. They’ll keep Clint in the observation ward for a few hours before they bring him up.   

“Sedatives?” Phil asks.

“If needed we will administer them.”   

“Keep them close at hand,” he advises grimly.

*    *    *

“Is he still in surgery?”

Phil looks up to see Natasha in the doorway to the waiting area.

“Recovery. It’ll be another hour at least before he’s back.” Phil saves the form he’s been trying to complete for the past half hour, then closes the laptop. He moves the stack of papers from the chair next to his to make space for her. “How did you make it back so fast?” He checks his watch. “I thought your flight wasn’t due for another two hours?”

“It wasn’t.” Natasha drops her bag on the floor and sits down next to him. “Tony somehow magicked up a Stark jet from somewhere. I didn’t know anything about it until I was pulled out of line at security and told to follow the two nice gentlemen.” She makes a sound like a short, hard laugh. “I thought my alias had been flagged on some watch list, and I’m not kidding you, Coulson,” she brings her thumb and index finger close together, “I was this close to taking them out and helping myself to a plane, because I had no intention of sitting around in custody for days, waiting for SHIELD to sort things out.”

“On behalf of SHIELD, thank you for not causing an international incident that may or may not have involved military jets trying to blow you out of the sky.”

“You’re quite welcome.” The small smile on her lips fades and she looks past him, towards the inner doors through which they will bring Clint at some point. “Any news?”

“They finished up with his hand, that much I know. And it looks like the damage to his eyes isn’t as bad as they feared.”

She just nods and folds her hands carefully in her lap. “And the rest?”

“No news on his ears yet.”

“He’s deaf.” 

“We don’t know that, Natasha.”   

“Yes, we do,” she says flatly. She stares at the bland, gray wall across from them. “There is no way that didn’t completely destroy his hearing. We’ll be lucky if he comes out of this without brain damage, and you know it.”

He shakes his head. “That spike would have had to be at least an inch longer to do that kind of damage.” It had been brought to the hospital in a plastic evidence bag to give the doctors as much information as possible about the damages that lay hidden deep inside Clint’s ears, and Phil had made himself look. 

“You saw it close up?”

Close enough to see the dark smears of Clint’s blood on it. “Yes.”

She watches him. He can see the war raging inside her, between the side that wants to believe that maybe it’s not as bad as she had imagined, and the side that says that things are _always_ that bad. 

“Antic,” she says. “Tell me you got her.”   

“We did,” he confirms.

“Where is she?” 

“Dead.”

A flash of hard anger passes behind Natasha’s eyes, and Phil knows she had wanted to get her hands on Antic. Never mind that was never on the table, SHIELD would never allow Natasha to get anywhere near her. She knows that as well as he does, but Phil can relate to the desire to inflict a massive amount of pain on anyone who hurts your loved ones.

“Why?” she demands. “What happened?”

“When we entered the room she was the only one still there. She was waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

Phil hesitates. “For you, I think.”

Natasha waits for him to continue. 

“By the time I was inside she already held a gun to her own head.” There had been an absolute calm in Antic’s eyes, the look of someone who had made final peace with the idea of dying. “She asked where you were. I think she wanted you there to get a chance to gloat.”

Gloat over what she had done. Over what she was about to do.

“When she realized you weren’t going to join the party she pulled the trigger.” Phil rubs at his eyes. “They found the husband dead yesterday morning. Overdose of morphine they think. Antic quit her job last month. Sold the house, updated her will. Set all her business in order. There are no signs she ever planned on getting away.”

“Pulling that trigger was one last ‘fuck you’ to me,” Natasha says tonelessly.  

Phil nods. Antic had made sure she got the last laugh by making sure that when everything was said and done there was nothing left for Natasha to exact revenge on. He rests his elbows on his knees and runs his hands over his face. He glances up when Natasha suddenly gets to her feet and walks out.

He thinks for a moment about going after her, but decides against it. For now. If she’s not back in twenty minutes he’ll go find her. He doesn’t blame her for needing some time to collect herself. She had been forced to watch her partner, her best friend, be hurt because of something she did. Two things she did. Crippling Antic’s husband all those years ago and then releasing the SHIELD documents that led Antic to Clint.

He closes his eyes and runs his finger slowly over the beads of Clint’s bracelet. He had put it under the tap when he got back home, watched the blood coloring the water. It’s unprofessional to have favorites, but Phil has long ago accepted the fact that Natasha and Clint will always have a special place in his heart. They have worked together for well over a decade, have been friends for a good part of that time, but it hasn’t always been easy. Not with Natasha. And certainly not with Clint.  

Clint’s life had early beaten a few lessons into him. Beaten them in hard. ‘Trust no one’ and ‘There’s always a hidden agenda’ had been the first ones. Clint, still young when they met, had been reeling from the changes in his life after being brought in by SHIELD, he had struggled to figure Phil out, to establish some kind of baseline with him, but when Phil hadn’t met his skewed expectations and instead had extended fair treatment, respect, and regular human kindness, Clint had first withdrawn, confused and nervous, then gone on the offensive.

 _No one_ does anything for free, Clint had hissed at him during one of their early confrontations, challenging Phil to deny it. The only thing that ever changes is the currency. So, what’s yours, Agent Coulson? Money? Someone to do your dirty work off the books? Maybe a quick fuck on the side when you feel like it? Just skip the bullshit and say it. Then I can respect you for being honest at least.

But Phil hadn’t engaged. That particular baseline wasn’t something he was interested in and Clint had left that argument frustrated and angry. The psych consult who was assigned Clint’s case had told Phil that the fact that Clint’s expectations, disturbing as they were, were now spelled out and on the table was to be viewed as progress. That meant they had something to work with.

Phil had let them both cool down for a few days before breaching the subject. Sitting in a quiet, undisturbed corner in the cantina he had explained very calmly over lunch what his expectations were and what they weren’t. Clint had been sullen and silent, slouching in the chair like some overgrown teenager. Phil had slid the code of conduct manual across the table, telling Clint that he expected him to be able to recite the section on what constituted sexual harassment and the disciplinary actions associated with that the following week. ‘Never thought you were such a delicate little flower,” Clint had muttered.

Miscommunication had been the name of the game back then, a stark contrast to the almost intuitive way they understood each other these days, and Phil had to explain that it wasn’t because Clint had done something wrong, or sexually harassed Phil, but to make sure he knew where the line was if anyone tried to solicit unwanted favors from him. Clint hadn’t replied, just kept scowling, but when Phil had dismissed him he had folded the manual and slid it into his back pocket before walking away.

Clint did not have it memorized the following week. It had been another round of conflicts and revoked privileges until Phil in frustration had put Clint in a chair in his office and told him to read the damn thing out loud. That had been how the extent of Clint’s reading abilities, or lack thereof, had come to light. Phil had ended up reading the section out loud to him that night. With Clint’s astonishing ability to retain information he had memorized most of it the first time. They had repeated it two days later, and after that he was able to recite the relevant section back to Phil. The fact that he enacted it with an imaginary sock puppet told Phil he still didn’t believe a word of it, saw it as nothing but pretty words printed on a page, but he knew it verbatim, and it had been a start at least.

It had taken four months for Clint to drop the near-open hostility he had come in with, another few for the more easy-going side of his personality to slowly, cautiously start showing its face. Things got better as time went by, but Phil knows it had been years before Clint truly trusted that he would have his back both on and off the field. Then Natasha had been brought in, and Phil knows that’s what finally cemented it. Not the fact that Phil had backed Clint up against Fury when he went against orders (though that probably helped quite a bit), rather because Clint suddenly was in a position where in order to make the situation work he had to convince someone else to trust Phil, and that had required him to take a long, hard look at his own habitual doubts. 

Phil’s phone pings with a status report from Sitwell. He scrolls through it quickly. Not much progress. A few leads on the participants, but that’s it. He rolls his shoulders and gets to his feet. He’s getting water from the water cooler when he hears Natasha come back. He looks over his shoulder to see her stopped halfway across the room.   

She crosses her arms over her chest like she’s cold. “What’s our game plan, Coulson?” she asks.

A feeling of helplessness falls over Phil. Natasha trusts him to have the backup plan, the contingencies. But he has nothing here. “There’s no game plan for this,” he sighs. “We just have to wait.”

“I’m not good at waiting.” The words come out like a plea, like she wants him to tell her what to do, how to fix this, how to not be useless and reduced to waiting in a hospital for news that won’t be good.   

“Come here,” he says and holds out his hand, beckons for her to come closer. Natasha doesn’t move. Phil puts the water cup down and closes the distance between them. He carefully pulls her in. Natasha stands rigid for a moment, and Phil almost expects her to twist away and leave again, but then she sags against him. She doesn’t move for a moment, then makes a quiet, choked sound and wraps her arms around him.

Contrary to popular belief, the Black Widow is actually human. Natasha Romanoff even more. And never more so than when it comes to Clint. 

As he holds her close, he has to admit that she’s not the only one needing a little comfort right now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, no, this isn't going to be done in 4 parts... Sorry.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: This chapter mentions the past suicide of an original character, as well as past suicidal behavior of a main character.

It’s early afternoon before Clint is brought back. Phil and Natasha, who have been camped out in the two chairs in his room, are told with a firmness that holds absolutely no room for protests that they need to step outside while the staff make Clint comfortable and set up all the equipment.

Natasha stands next to Phil in the corridor outside when they roll Clint past them, her face expressionless. When the door closes on Clint she walks away without a word. Phil watches her leave and wonders if this is going to be a pattern.

A steady stream of medical staff move in and out of Clint’s room, but none of them exude the kind of professionally tamped down urgency that Phil links to emergencies and bad news coming his way, so he figures Clint is doing okay. As okay as he can be doing under the circumstances.

It feels like an eternity before he’s let back in the room, but it’s probably no more than twenty minutes. When he steps inside two nurses remain in the room, checking and rechecking systems and readings and everything Clint is hooked up to. He’s hooked up to _a lot_. Phil stays back, waits by the door, unwilling to get in the way, but one of the nurses looks up from securing the IV injection port on the inside of his good arm with more surgical tape.

“Come on in,” she says and waves him closer.

Phil steps up to the bed. The guard rails on the bed are raised, and as he looks down at Clint he can’t help thinking _small_ and _vulnerable_ and _hurting_. Clint is pale, his lashes dark under the swollen, reddish eyelids. His injured left hand lies elevated on a pillow, the bandages the size of a boxing glove. Only the tips of Clint’s fingers peek out from under the wrapping. The bandages are very white, very clean, in stark contrast to the dark, dried blood under Clint’s short nails. Phil knows incisions and sutures and more blood hide further up under the bandages. Bruises and fixation pins and many, many months of pain and frustration and rehab.

The nurse brings a chair to the side of the bed and pats the back of it, indicating to Phil to sit down. He recognizes her vaguely. Her name tag says Camilla H. and her scrubs have a butterfly pattern that looks more like it belongs in a children’s ward than in a SHIELD high-dependency unit. Phil thinks maybe it’s a way to counteract the nurse equivalent of white-coat syndrome, an attempt to put patients and visitors alike more at ease.

“Can I get something for you?” she asks. “A sandwich or something?”

Phil manages a polite smile and sits down. “Thanks. I’m fine.”

She gives his shoulder a gentle pat and gets back to her tasks.

A white patient bracelet circles the wrist of Clint’s unhurt hand. The only things on it are his SHIELD service number and a barcode that hides the rest of his information from prying, curious and unauthorized eyes. Full name, date of birth, blood type, medical history, emergency contacts, medical proxies, address, phone number, the works. There’s another plastic bracelet resting just above the white one. It’s bright red. The word ‘ALLERGIES’ are written in block letters on it. Phil is pleased to see that after way too many years this has finally made its way to the top of Clint’s file. Clint isn’t actually allergic, it’s more of an adverse reaction to certain kinds of drugs, but as long as it’s flagged Phil doesn’t care what they call it.

Most regular staff members – like the nurse that reported from the OR - are aware of it, but there is always the risk that someone forgets in a stressful situation, or that someone new comes in. A hurt and confused Clint Barton spinning off into chemically induced paranoia with a side of anxiety driven aggression isn’t anyone’s idea of a good time. 

Phil’s eyes wander to the bandages that wrap around Clint’s head, covering his ears. Most of the blood he had seen when they had extracted Clint has been washed away, but he sees a patch of short hair sticking out from under the bandages that is still matted and clumped together.

It bothers him.

“Actually,” he says to Camilla. “There is one thing. Do you have a wet wipe?” She digs in a drawer and hands him a few single packs. He tears one open and leans in, about to start washing to blood away, but stops before his fingers touch Clint’s hair. “Is it safe to…?” he asks.

“Perfectly safe,” she assures him.  

“Will it wake him up?”

“No, that’s unlikely.”

She’s right. Clint doesn’t even stir as Phil carefully starts to clean him off. It’s not easy, a wet wipe isn’t the optimal way to clean someone’s hair, but he does the best he can.

“Were you ever stationed in Los Angeles,” he asks as he drops the wipe in the bowl Camilla holds out. He’s not usually one for idle chit chat, but right now he could use a little distraction. He opens another pack of wipes.   

“I was. For five years. I transferred here last summer.”

“I thought I recognized you from there.”

He gives the wipe to her, and she disposes it in a ‘biohazard’ container that sits on the small counter by the door. “The San Andreas thing, right?” she asks over her shoulder.

Phil nods. San Andreas had been a disaster from start to finish. Bad intel, unfortunate timing, technical issues and sheer bad luck had combined into the perfect storm and had left nine SHIELD operatives injured. Phil had sat vigil then, too.

“How is he?” Camilla asks. “What was his name, your young agent? Sebastian? Is he doing okay these days?”

“Santiago,” he says. Castel Santiago had been Phil’s newest asset and he had sustained the worst injuries by far. He shakes his head. “It didn’t… end well.”  

“Oh.” She looks sad. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

Double lower limb amputations and severely reduced lung capacity. It had been a devastating blow, and at age twenty-seven, Santiago had been medically discharged from SHIELD. Santiago had moved back to Ohio to continue rehab and despite Phil’s best efforts the contact had slowly become more sporadic after about a year. Phil still tried to call, tried to keep in touch. He visited when he was passing through the state and had time to spare (he made sure he had time to spare). Unsurprisingly, the way Santiago’s world had completely shattered had been hard on him. After the first four month it had become bad to the point where Phil had seriously worried and talked about Santiago’s state of mind with the cross-functional outpatient team at SHIELD who oversaw his rehabilitation. It’s a natural phase to go through, they told him. Grieving is part of the healing. Phil knows this, knew it even then, but he still worried.  

But it had eventually gotten better. Progress was slow, but it had been there. Or so Phil had thought until fourteen month down the line when he was told the kid had put his gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

He never got better, Phil had realized. Santiago had just gotten better at hiding it.

“Just let us know if you need something else,” Camilla says kindly. “Sandra here,” she motions to the second nurse who is busy adjusting Clint’s drips for the third time, “will stick around.”

Sandra looks up and gives him a small smile before turning her attention back to Clint. 

Phil sits down, rests his elbows on his knees and watches Clint sleep. He tries very hard not to draw any parallels between this and San Andreas.

*    *    *

Forty minutes later Phil hears the door pushed open and he looks up, expecting Natasha, but it’s another familiar face, and he gets to his feet.

Harrison shakes Phil’s hand. “It’s a damn shame we only get a chance to catch up when shit like this happens.”

Phil agrees, not just because it’s been years since he last saw Kev Harrison, but because even though every single person on SHIELD’s medical payroll is the best of the best, it’s comforting to know he is the one in charge here.

Harrison steps around the bed to take a closer look at the monitors. He retrieves the digital tablet from under his arm and swipes through what looks like pages and pages of tables and diagrams. Phil gets a glimpse of what looks like multiple scans of Clint’s head. Harrison sits down on the very edge of the bed, motioning for Phil to sit down again. He takes his glasses off, folds them and tucks them into his chest pocket. He looks like a man who is longing for his bed, and has been longing for it for the past two days.

“You ready for the four-one-one?” he asks Phil.

Phil isn’t sure he is, not if the news is bad, but he nods anyway.

“I operated on Barton’s hand. The injures are, well, they’re pretty damn bad to be honest, but you already knew that. So far the reattached finger looks good. We managed to restore blood flow to it fairly quickly, but—“

Phil glances at Clint and raises his hand to stop Harrison. “Maybe we should take this outside?”

“We can if you want to,” Harrison says evenly. “But he can’t hear us, if that’s what you’re worried about. The structures that transfer sound from the outer ear through to the inner ear are severely damaged. The wires have essentially been cut. No signals are reaching his audial nerve.”

“None at all?”

Harrison gives a grim shake of his head. “I’m sorry.”  

Phil scrubs his hands over his face. He had tried to convince Natasha that there might still be hope for Clint’s hearing, but deep down he had expected this, had feared it ever since he heard the live narration of what that madwoman had done. But trying to prepare for something like this is always bound to fail and it still feels like a cold, hard rock materializes in his stomach.  

He lifts his head and looks up at Harrison. “Brain damage?”

This is a question he truly dreads to hear the answer to. He is almost certain that he’s right in his earlier assessment that the metal spike that had been driven into Clint’s ears had been too short to reach past the inner ear, but he needs to know for sure.

“From what we can see on the scans, the injuries are limited to the ear canal.”  

“Thank God.” Phil closes his eyes in relief for a moment, then opens them and sits up straighter. “What’s the prognosis?”

“The swelling needs to come down so we can get a better look and figure out what our options are.”

The hedging answer is exactly the one Phil expects, the one he doesn’t want. Natasha isn’t the only one desperately looking for answers. “But there _are_ options?” he presses. “Things that can be done for his hearing?”

“You’ve been around the block enough times to know I can’t make any promises. We simply have to wait and see.”   

Phil knows this is the mantra he will live by for the next couple of days, maybe weeks and months. Wait and see. Wait to find out the extent of the damage, and see what (if anything) can be done. He hates it already.  

“What about his hand?” he asks. “I didn’t let you finish. Will he be able to use the finger you reattached? And the rest of them, the broken ones?”

“The neurosurgeons were happy with the result when they were done. If no complications set in he should get at least some movement back. But—“

“I know. No guarantees.”

“The other two fingers were badly broken, but we reset and stabilized them.” Harrison gives a thin, tired smile as he continues. “Your boy will be setting off metal detectors for a while.” He drops the smile and continues, but he doesn’t look quite as grim as before. “As for his eyes, the damage was less than we first thought. Whatever they gave him was a serious chemical irritant, he’s got grade two burns, but they didn’t go deep. His eyes will be sore and he’ll be extremely photosensitive for a while, a week or two, but his eyes should have a good chance of healing without scarring.”

Phil nods, grateful that the tentatively positive news from earlier is still positive.

Harrison gets to his feet and stretches with a groan, hands pressed again the small of his back as he watches Clint. “He should wake up soon.”

“Define ‘soon’.”

“Anytime between now and four hours. But don’t expect too much of him when he does, he’s on a lot of potent painkillers. He’ll be in and out for a while.”

“Pulling out the good stuff, huh?”

“Only the best for Hawkeye.” Harrison clasps Phil’s shoulder and heads towards the door. “I’m heading out. Keller is the attending today, I will tell her to swing around later.”

Phil doesn’t recognize the name. “New?”

“At SHIELD? Yes. Six months, give or take. In the game? No. Met her first time in Saudi in ninety... three?” Harrison pauses. “I think? I’m pretty sure it was Saudi, but maybe it was ninety-five. Anyway, I’ve known her for a long-ass time. ” He shakes his head. “God, she wasn’t more than a kid back then.”

“You and I were no more than kids back then,” Phil points out.  

Harrison huffs good-naturedly. “You were never a kid, Coulson. You were born old.”

Phil rolls his eyes, but it’s a familiar, friendly kind of barb. “So is she any good, this Keller?”    

“I recommended her, so what do you think?”

Phil thinks Keller is probably out of this world if Harrison vouched for her. 

“Well, I’m off.” Harrison extends his hand and shakes Phil’s again. “I’m two hours late for a six-hour date with my bunk. I’ll check back in when I start my shift at eight.  

“I’ll be here.”

“No doubt.”   

*    *    *

It’s almost an hour later when Natasha shows up again. She stops in the doorway and Phil watches her eyes linger for a moment on Clint. He’s as deeply asleep as before. She shows Phil the plastic bag in her hand without a word and then turns on her heel.

Phil puts the laptop he’s been working on to the side and gets to his feet. “Sandra.”

The nurse looks up from where she’s perched in the corner with a dog-eared paperback.

“I'll be in in the waiting area getting something to eat. If he starts showing any signs of waking up, _any_ signs, please come get me.”

She nods. “Of course.” 

Phil finds Natasha already digging into a white takeout box with her chopsticks. She pushes the bag on the floor towards Phil with her foot. When Phil sits down next to her, he feels the smell of cigarettes linger around her.

It surprises him a little. Natasha smokes when a mission calls for it, but other than that she’s far too conscious of the need to keep her body in the best shape possible. Smoking doesn’t exactly promote great lung capacity. Not to mention the way the smell risks giving you away as soon as you get within twenty feet of your target. She doesn’t often go for stealth, her modus operandi is all about interacting with her targets, but it happens. Clint isn’t a habitual smoker either, but once or twice Phil has spotted Natasha off to the side with him, the two of them sitting shoulder to shoulder, passing a cigarette furtively between them like a couple of teenagers. As closely knit as the three of them are as a team, Clint and Natasha have something Phil isn’t part of. It’s not deliberate, he's not actively excluded, and if he would walk over they’d make space for him without hesitation. He never has, because those little moments are something reserved for just the two of them. He’s happy to let them have that.  

He retrieves the second takeout box from the plastic bag on the floor. Fried noodles with chicken. Phil more or less inhales the greasy content, partly because he hasn't eaten all day and he realizes he's starving, but also because he doesn't want to be away for too long, not when Clint could wake anytime. Even though Sandra promised to come get them, he wants to get back. 

“Any word from Sitwell yet?” Natasha asks when Phil is almost done with his noodles.

Phil chews and swallows before he answers. “Nothing worth reporting. They have a few leads on the old man, and two of the guys who took him down in that alley have been identified.”

“But not picked up yet?”

“It’s just a matter of time.”    

Natasha nods and doesn’t engage in any more conversation. They finish their meal quickly and return to Clint.  

*   *   *

Midday turns into early afternoon and Phil waits for the next time Natasha will take off. But she sticks around. She drags her chair to the window and gets settled with it tilted back on its hind legs and her socked feet on the low window sill. She doesn’t move, doesn’t speak as they wait for Clint to wake up. Phil is under no illusion that the position is anything but deliberate. With her back to the room she can be present and still keep some kind of distance to the extent of Clint’s injuries, but more often than not when he looks over, he sees her watch her partner in the reflection of the window.

Sandra is eventually relieved by the nurse from the night before, the one who had given Phil the silver chain and the bracelet. He hadn’t looked for a name tag, but he does now. Vicey, it says, and he spends a moment wondering if that’s her first or last name. He always makes an effort to remember the nurses’ names, mostly because his mother raised him right, but also because even the smallest personal connection makes it easier to smooth over Natasha and Clint’s occasionally abrasive behavior when they end up needing medical attention. They’re diehard professionals in the field, but off it they’re sometimes like petulant children, both of them.

Vicey stays unobtrusively out of the way, and Phil is working on decimating the pile of requisitions and evaluations when she calls his name quietly from the edge of Clint's bed. Phil looks up. Natasha’s chair makes a ‘thump’ as she puts it down on all four legs.

“I think he's starting to come around.” Vicey presses the call button. “The doctor asked to be present when he wakes,” she explains.  

The three of them watch in silence how Clint lashes flutter for a moment. Then nothing. A full minute passes and Phil is starting to think it's a false alarm when the tip of Clint's tongue peeks out and makes a small, slow run over his dry lips. He sighs deeply and softly before he slowly opens his eyes a tiny crack. It’s nowhere near as dramatic as Phil had feared. He should have known better, because of course Clint is still drugged to the gills.

The door opens and a woman in a white doctor’s coat arrives with another nurse in tow. Keller, Phil assumes. She nods at him before exchanging a few quiet words with Vicey by the foot end of Clint’s bed, then she rounds the bed.

“You can touch him,” she tells Phil and Natasha. “If you want to.”  

Phil sits carefully on the edge of the bed and hesitates before placing his hand on Clint’s good arm, mindful of the IV lines there. Clint blinks sluggishly, his eyes glossy and unfocused. Phil can feel Natasha hovering behind him. He looks over his shoulder and beckons her closer, but she shakes her head. 

Clint blinks another couple of times, still not tracking at all, and Phil leans a little closer, placing himself more solidly in his line of sight. Nothing. Phil waves his hand slowly in front of Clint’s eyes in a bid to catch any small sliver of consciousness that might hide underneath the heavy drugs.

“You sure he can see anything?” he asks Keller.

“It’s the medication that’s making him unresponsive. Keep trying.”

“What is he on?” Despite the presence of the allergy bracelet Phil feels the need to make sure it’s not Dilaudid.

Keller looks at her tablet and rattles off a short list, complete with dosage and intervals, and Phil nods, satisfied that hydromorphone isn’t on it. He rubs Clint’s forearm gently again, and this time he’s rewarded by a minute shift of Clint’s eyes in the direction of the touch. The gaze never quite makes it all the way, but Phil wants to tell him ‘A for effort’, because he knows how hard it is to fight the warm embrace of post-surgery opioids.

“Hey,” Phil says, even though he knows now that Clint can’t hear it. “Wakey, wakey.”   

Clint sluggishly drags his gaze up to meet Phil’s. His eyes are still bloodshot, red and swollen, but there’s not much in them besides the flat blankness of drugs. Phil smiles at him, rubs his thumb over the warm skin of Clint’s wrist. He uses his fingertips to push the plastic patient bracelets out of the way a fraction, then rests his fingers over Clint’s pulse point. The warm beat under his fingers is slow and steady, reassuring in a way that the backlit digits on the monitor next to the bed aren’t.   

“Phil,” Clint mumbles hoarsely after a moment.

Something hard and tight in Phil uncurls a fraction. Despite the earlier assurances he hadn't quite dared to believe Clint would actually be able to see.

“Hi there.” Despite the tightness at the back of his throat he thinks he manages to sound pretty relaxed.

Clint only manages to hold Phil’s gaze for a few seconds before his eyes start to slip closed. A few seconds pass and Phil thinks he’s asleep again, but then Clint’s brow knits a fraction. When he tugs weakly at the arm Phil is still holding, Phil lets go, afraid suddenly that this is what’s going to tip Clint over into a panic. Without opening his eyes Clint lifts his good hand. The movement is slow and loose and uncoordinated, and Phil intercepts it before Clint can touch the bandage over his ears. He gently guides the hand back down.

“You’re on mute, Boss,” Clint mumbles.

Then he's out.

*   *   *

The rain starts falling as daylight fades into dusk, the intensity of it rising with the approaching darkness. By the time it’s completely dark, it is pouring down and the streets outside are painted shiny and reflective, catching the lights of passing cars and the glare of the lit up ambulance admission bay six floors below. Natasha is back in the chair at the window, alternating again between staring at the darkness beyond the glass pane and watching the reflection of Clint sleeping. She has said all of four words since Clint’s brief brush with consciousness.

Phil gets up and drags his own chair and sits down next to her.

“You know he'll never hold it against you.”

“I know.” Her voice is toneless.  

Phil can’t tell if this irrefutable fact is a comfort to her right now, or something that hurts. He thinks she might actually prefer if Clint was the kind of person who would hate her for this. It would kill her, but Natasha would take it as penance, a small down payment towards the massive debt her inner bookkeeper has already penned into her old and worn ledger.   

He covers her hand with his, and it stills where it’s worrying at something on her leg that only she can see. “Natasha. Talk to me.”

“What's to say?” Her eyes don’t move from the window and the rain that streaks down it. “He may never blame me, but I _am_ to blame. I did this.”

“No. Antic did this.”

“Semantics,” she says softly. 

“What do you need? Right now, what do you need?”

“What I need isn’t anything you can give me.”

“Let me try.” When she doesn’t answer, he squeezes her hand. 

He almost hears the metaphorical and sorely overstretched rubber band snap. She puts her feet down sharply and gets up. The chair scrapes backwards a few inches from the sudden move. “I need Clint to wake up and not be damaged,” she growls. She keeps her voice down, but it’s full of sharp, dangerous edges. “I need to kill Ivica Antic and her lackeys in the worst way I know how. Can you give me _that_? I need to—“ She cuts herself off and stands there, unmoving for a three-count, then she spins on her heel and heads towards the door.

Phil stands up. “Don’t go. He’ll want you here when he wakes up again.”

She shrugs her jacket on. “If I'm here or not won’t make a difference. He’s not going to remember it.”

“You’re probably right. He’ll see you and forget you were there ten seconds later, but remembering isn’t the point. Right there and then he’ll know he’s not alone and that you’re watching over him. That’s the point.”

“He won’t be alone. You’ll be here.”

“But I’m not the one he wants when he wakes up badly,” Phil points out evenly. ”I’m not the one he goes to when he’s on that knife’s edge where the only two choices open to him are suicidal recklessness or darkest depression. You know it. You might not be comfortable with it, you might not even like it, but you’re his lifeline and he’s going to be struggling to stay above the surface very soon. Don’t let go of the rope now.”

She spins on him. “Fuck your, Coulson,” she hisses. “I wasn’t the one who left him to drown after Loki. You were gone ten months,  _ten months_ , and every single morning I woke up wondering if that day would be the one I’d find him hanging in the goddamn closet. Or would have to clean his brain off the wall. _I_ was there. Where were you?” She gives him a hard look, full of contempt and anger. “Oh, that’s right. You were out playing with your new team, too busy to tell him you were alive. He had to find out from YouTube that he’d been replaced. Discarded.”

Phil waits. This isn’t new, her anger and hurt over how everything had played out after Loki. He wishes so much he could do things differently, but he can’t, what’s done is irrevocably done, and at the time he really had thought he’d done Clint a favor by staying away. By not tearing up those wounds again. He had been so excruciatingly wrong. “I know,” he tells her quietly, because he does. He knows exactly what kind of damage he did. To Clint. And to Natasha. And he has spent every day since trying to make up for the biggest screw-up of his life. “And I’m so sorry you had to go through that alone.”  

She keeps glaring at him for a few seconds, then she closes her eyes, visibly trying to get herself under control.

Voices from the corridor outside drift in as the silence between them stretches. The muted sound of a car passing below bleeds through the window.

When Natasha opens her eyes again all he sees is bone deep tiredness. “I need some air,” she mumbles and slips out of the room.

Clint is out. Vicey is on one-on-one duty still, and she sits by the wall, filling out paperwork silently on a clipboard in her lap. She looks up and meets his eyes.

“Go on,” she tells him and nods after Natasha. “I’ll be here.”

Phil grabs his own jacket and follows Natasha down the echoing staircase to the doors by the admission bay. He catches up just as she’s in the process of lighting up another cigarette. The small flame flickers behind her cupped hand and dies before the cigarette is lit. She swears under her breath and tries again. This time she manages.

Phil holds out his hand. “Bum one?”

Natasha hands the pack and the lighter over without looking at him.

They smoke in silence, shoulder by shoulder, pressed up against the wall under the rigid awning that protects them from most of the rain. Phil pulls his jacket tighter around himself and wonders if this helps. If he’s any kind of consolation for Clint’s absence in this little ritual of theirs.

Later, he thinks maybe it did, because when they get back to the room Natasha pulls the chair from the window to the bed and for the first time since she arrived back from Germany he sees her looking at Clint for longer than two seconds.    

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah, f*ck it, I'm just gonna go ahead and remove the estimated number of chapters from the header. At this point I have no idea how long this will turn out to be.


End file.
